Cultural appropriation

[eirias]

Pursuant to a conversation elsewhere, a poll!

NOTE! For the purpose of this poll, "foreigner" refers to someone who is foreign in several ways:

1. he has no familial claim to the culture (no relation by blood or marriage);
2. he does not and has not lived in the culture;
3. he has no deep knowledge or understanding of the culture, and/or does not speak the language.

Use the comments to clarify anything you like.

(Note: I submitted blank answers but that's only so I can easily see poll results without changing them; one should not infer from that that I think all the options are inappropriate.)

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[Poll #1267976]

Comments

[paperkingdoms]

Put me in with most everyone else with fuzzy responses... the public/private line is interesting. But what's sort of coalescing for me is an intent to claim the cultural bit as your own, or the likelihood of perceived intent. So eating food is something that's done by lots of people as a way to try something new; it'd be unusual for "foreigners" to portray it as their own. But there's a strong sense of ownership with tattoos [aside from the "writing things you don't understand" issue]. With a slightly different twist, giving medical treatment puts you in a position of authority [which could be actively negated, but it would be very difficult to do so].

I don't know if that's *quite* it, but it's close to the gut feeling I have, at least.

That might be a more productive line...

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I think that's a large part of it - whether your particular "appropriation" seems to imply you are an authority on a culture you know next to nothing about. Eating in the restaurant implies nothing. Even cooking a dish at home doesn't imply much. Leading a religious/cultural service does. Getting a culturally important image or phrase as a tattoo does. It "claims" the culture much more distinctly.

The latter, authority-laden activities tend to imply cultural knowledge and continuity, so it's disingenuous to perform those actions without the appropriate contextual knowledge, and could lead to a lot of misunderstandings about the source culture (transcription errors, like I mentioned above). That's disrespectful to the source.

Maybe the "claim on culture" is the real dividing line - though obviously it's a fuzzy one that different people will interpret differently.

Re: That might be a more productive line...

[paperkingdoms]

::nods:: One of the cases I was thinking about was a belly dance thing, actually... so we're already talking about American, mostly white people, doing middle eastern dance. But we were talking about the Zar recently... a spot where dance goes from an artistic means of expression to something purposeful [cleansing]. And so it's a place where you get some of these questions coming up -- learning the Zar is generally considered OK, but you want to learn it from someone who knows what they're doing. Performing it or teaching it, though, are things to be taken up very carefully. And it's a stance I agree with, but I think it's an interesting snapshot of how nuanced some of these conversations are.

Re: That might be a more productive line...

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's always interesting to see the line where an artistic expression becomes a cultural practice, a meditation, etc... and it's something you're only aware of with a proper grounding in the culture, and something you can only impart if you've studied it rigorously and seriously.